TRENDS: Getting Crowded Here

Despite wars and a falling birth rate, the
population of the world will probably double within the next 70 years
to about 5 billion people, the Population Reference Bureau estimated
this week. Reason: medicine and technology are letting people live
longer.

Still, such prophecies have been wrong before: Abraham Lincoln, on the
basis of population growth in his day, estimated that the U.S would
have a population of 250 million by 1930, and turned out to have
predicted twice too many.